May 10-11, 2016 | New York Hilton Midtown

Formats, Protocols & Standards

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

A101 - How To: Live Social Broadcasting: Comparing Facebook Live, YouTube Live and Periscope

Attendees to this session will learn how to use the social platforms to broadcast live video across Periscope, Facebook and YouTube. Learn how to create live streaming video for these platforms; how to shoot live video with solid quality; and how to use their interactive elements. Hear how streaming live increases viewer engagement and learn about additional hardware tools that make for great live streaming broadcasts. Led by Mario Armstrong, NBC TODAY show Digital Lifestyle Contributor, who has done over 600 Periscope broadcasts and uses Facebook live and YouTube live weekly.

Led by the popularity of video games, virtual reality (VR) will, over the next several years, become a pop cultural phenomenon. It has few rivals in terms of its potential to provide a low-cost, portable, and yet highly immersive experience. Of course, none of this means that VR’s future as a mainstream platform is certain. This session addresses key questions including these: When will there be a meaningful market for VR video? How will marketers and advertisers influence this new medium? How should operators and networks (linear or on-demand) view the potential of VR? To what extent will VR impact the viewing of TV and movies?

C102 - Demo: Hands-On With Streaming Devices and OTT Platforms

In this special session, Dan Rayburn presents a hands-on comparison showcasing the leading streaming devices, and content platforms. Devices from Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Roku, and Sony are compared, along with every major OTT service. You also see a demo of the latest 4K offerings and learn how to stream content from phones and tablets and display it on your TV.

A103 - Codec Battle Revisited: HEVC vs. AVC In 2016

HEVC's imminent upsweep has hit a strong stumble as royalty uncertainties worry broadcasters and new gains in AVC efficiency satisfy current needs for OTT and broadcasting applications alike. The shift towards virtualized and software-based real-time encoders and just-in-time transcoders also favors AVC for now. That said, new processors and consumer devices are making big bets on HEVC and there are indeed areas where HEVC can add significant value without significant risk. This presentation will present revised forecasts for HEVC uptake, along with recommendations on choice of codecs and architectures for popular applications, in the context of ongoing trends such as 4K, virtual reality and virtualization.

D103 - Adaptive Bitrate Algorithms: How They Work And How To Optimize Your Stack

Adaptive bitrate algorithms are paramount for delivering content that is adapted to the multitude of devices and network conditions. Striking a balance between achieving the highest quality possible without causing stalls is a complex task that involves estimating unknowns such as bandwidth and CPU stress. Another challenge is that the optimal algorithms can vary greatly depending on bitrates, stream types and whether the content is live or VoD. This presentation is designed to give broadcasters a look into how adaptive bitrate algorithms work and, using examples of open-source players such as (dash.js & hls.js), how to optimize them according to your many business and technical considerations.

DT103 - Discovery Track

Case Study: Scality Enables a Major Sports Broadcaster to Build a VOD Platform to Stream Live Games

1:45 p.m. - 2:05 p.m.

VOD is becoming increasingly popular for live sports events. Platforms such as MLB.TV, NFL Now or Eurosport Player enable fans to views games or highlights when they want and where they want. Content providers have to cater for their viewers' needs while still being able to monetize the service. Consumers must be kept interested through a rich, interactive viewing experience, but the platforms and infrastructures that enable the service must also be cost-efficient.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Cards Against Humanity game

In today’s online environment, users expect video to be available on every platform with low startup delay and no buffering. Due to a reliance on older technologies, many companies throughout the video industry are losing subscriptions, losing advertisers and losing money as their users become frustrated by slow video. This presentation will explain how to deliver the best possible user experience, through cutting-edge online video streaming solutions with cloud encoding and video playback with HTML5.

DT104 - Discovery Track

Are You So Focused on Video That You’re Neglecting Audio?

2:45 p.m. - 3:05 p.m.

Even when your video is perfect, nothing sours a streaming experience more quickly than poor audio. Whether you are running the whole show yourself or receiving an audio feed from the “sound guy,” there are several areas you need to pay attention to when combining audio into your live video stream. Learn about audio signals and how to speak with sound engineers using their language. Demystify elements of audio such as mic/line levels, balanced vs. unbalanced, dBu/dBV/dbFS units, crest factor, headroom, analog vs. digital clipping, and input attenuation/gain/trim so you can produce videos that sound as good as they look.

We’ll start by going from zero to 4K live streaming in minutes. Using Wowza and other technologies, we'll deliver live adaptive bitrate streaming using H.264, H.265, or VP9, record the video for on-demand playback, and deliver the live feed with global any-screen streaming. Then we'll take another few minutes to leverage 4K to create immersive VR/360 experience.

Attend this session for your chance to win: A Wowza Streaming Cloud high-volume plan for one month, including 100 hours of compute time and 5,000 GB of global CDN delivery ($600 value)

The cloud is having an unprecedented impact of the cloud on media and entertainment industry business models. Keith Wymbs, chief marketing officer for Elemental, will share insights about media leaders who are going “all in the cloud”. This keynote will delve into leading edge end-to-end media workflows, the advantages of video processing and delivery from the cloud, and how Amazon’s 2015 acquisition of Elemental represents the future of the media industry.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

B201 - Twitter Video: A Unique, Live Connection to Culture

Twitter is redefining mobile video. Through a variety of formats from Native Video to Vine to Periscope, Twitter has become the most effective way to earn attention and drive instant engagement. This presentation will detail the strategic and dynamic ways that brands use Twitter video to move beyond just buying impressions and to capitalize on Twitter's unique, live connection to culture.

C201 - DASH Today: Consortia Adoptions and Industry Deployments

This panel discusses the latest developments in DASH, both in standardization as well as consortia adoption, particularly new developments in MPEG, DASH-IF, ATSC 3.0, and the CTA GIVE projects. The panelists talk about these new developments, recent DASH commercial deployments, challenges and lesson learns from previous ones, and how the streaming industry is evolving around DASH deployments.

In this session you’ll learn how successful enterprise teams balance their creative video messaging with production best practices to engage their customers. We’ll also examine how small changes in your planning, production and review process can improve your video output and productivity. Given its impact in recent years, we’ll discuss how content marketing has affected video performance across your digital channels and audiences. To ensure we don’t overlook your audience’s user experience, we’ll review which video player features have the most impact on enterprise customers and why. Finally, we’ll share how various hosting and sharing platforms are optimized for different video formats.

DT202 - Discovery Track

The How and Why of Using Subjective Testing for Perceptual Quality Optimization

11:45 a.m. - 12:05 p.m.

Widely hailed a powerful and promising means of improving existing video compression, perceptual quality optimization (PQO) integrates consideration of the human visual system into the video encoding process. How well PQO succeeds in improving human perception of videos is best measured by human subjects, through subjective testing. This talk describes how EuclidIQ uses subjective testing to measure the gains from and inform the further development of IQ264, our technology that integrates PQO directly into H.264 encoding and achieves 25% bandwidth savings on average relative to reference H.264 encoding at equivalent quality.

Why Your Video Streaming Fails, and Your Customers Hate You Because of It

12:10 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.

60% of all user interactions suffer from video playback issues, yet not much is done to help solve this. Rebuffering and downgrading to subpar video bitrates continues unabated as high-speed broadband and faster cellular networks have reached near ubiquity in the United States and some international markets. So why does video still fail and rebuffer? What is the impact of video stream issues on revenue, brand, and churn? We explore these questions and more.

See how enterprises are able to deliver streaming video at scale, breaking both geographical and volume barriers. This session discusses some of the fundamentals of video playback at Ustream, along with methods for reaching mobiles and overcoming buffering issues. It then covers robust video delivery methods through SD-CDN (Software Defined Content Delivery Network) and how enterprises can scale video assets horizontally.

A204 - The Great OTT Migration

As consumers continue to view content on multiple devices, cut the cord, binge TV and seek new ways to watch, a Great OTT Migration is afoot among the largest providers around the globe. This panel will discuss the hurdles in front of the Great OTT Migration, everything from tech behemoths bidding for sports streaming rights, costs, publishers phasing into broadcasters, technical hurdles, meeting consumer expectations, and a general debate about what will decide the winners from the losers.